Translation of documents is often desired, if not required, in many circumstances. For instance, lots of literary work (e.g., novels, technical publications, product manuals, etc.) is translated into multiple natural languages so that people speaking different languages may be able to read the literary work. A natural language as used herein generally refers to a language written or spoken by humans for general-purpose communication, as opposed to constructs, such as computer-programming languages, machine-readable or machine-executable languages, or the languages used in the study of formal logic, such as mathematical logic. Some examples of a natural language include English, German, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, etc.
Conventionally, translation is often done by human beings with expertise in the relevant natural languages. However, for huge volumes of literary work, translation may take a lot of time and labor. Thus, some computerized or automated translation tools have been developed to speed up translation. While these conventional tools help to reduce the time it takes to translate literary work, these conventional tools are generally limited to a specific pair of natural languages. That is, one conventional tool for translating English into French, and/or vice versa, typically cannot translate English into German. Users have to use another tool, or another version of the tool, to translate English into German. It is costly for users to purchase multiple tools, or multiple versions of a translation tool, in order to translate one piece of literary work into multiple languages. It is also inconvenient for the users because the users have to install and maintain multiple tools, or multiple versions of the translation tool, on their computer.
In addition to the above problem, the users may have to acquire additional tools to convert the literary work into different formats in order to publish the literary work via multiple different media or channels. For example, the users may have to use a web publishing tool to convert the translated document into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) in order to publish the literary work over a network (e.g., the Internet). In another example, the users may have to use another word processing tool to convert the translated document into a portable read-only viewing format. As a result, users today may need many tools in order to publish a document in multiple languages and/or various formats.